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WASHINGTON — General Motors CEO Mary Barra heads back before congressional investigators this morning armed with an internal report on what led to the recall of 2.6 million cars for a deadly defect but facing tough new questions about just how pervasive safety problems are at GM.

Since the beginning of the year, the automaker has recalled 20 million cars in North America, an astronomic figure that seems to grow each day or two. On Monday, GM recalled 3.4 million more vehicles for a problem some in Congress found hauntingly similar to a defect already linked to 13 deaths.

“This is not just a Cobalt problem,” said House Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton, a St. Joseph Republican, referring to the car whose initial recall led to House and Senate hearings, a record $35-million fine and a reported Justice Department probe. “Drivers and their families need to be assured that their cars are safe.”

Unlike her first appearance before the full committee’s oversight and investigations subcommittee in April, however, Barra this time will be expected to answer questions, many of which she avoided then by saying she was waiting for former U.S. Attorney Anton Valukas to finish an internal report.

That 325-page report is done now — Valukas is also slated to testify today — and Barra will be expected not only to explain how she will fix a dysfunctional corporate culture that failed to understand the impact of its own engineering defects for more than a decade, but how widespread those problems might be.

GM had by mid-April of this year ordered the recall of 2.6 million Chevrolet Cobalts, Saturn Ions and similar cars for a faulty ignition switch in which the key can be jostled out of place, potentially disabling air bags. But in the past week, it has recalled 3.9 million other vehicles for similar issues where a driver’s knee or crossing a railroad track can move a key out of position — even though the ignition switch itself does not appear to be to blame.

“I think she has to answer their questions as directly and as clearly as she can,” said Carl Tobias, who teaches product-liability courses at the University of Richmond School of Law. “I expect them to grill her with the report that GM commissioned, especially when it makes GM look like it did not make safety paramount.”

In her prepared testimony, released by the House committee Tuesday, Barra called Valukas’ report “extremely thorough, brutally tough and deeply troubling” and outlined the efforts the company has taken, including firing 15 people and adding nearly three dozen new safety investigators.

But Republicans and Democrats are expected to demand answers about questions left unanswered by Valukas’ report and, perhaps more significantly, what legislative steps should be taken, if any, to ensure that the red flags GM should have seen but didn’t do not go undetected.

Valukas could come under sharp questioning, too: On Tuesday, the Center for Auto Safety in Washington in a letter to Valukas and investigators called the report “clearly flawed,” saying its author was wrong to accept GM management’s explanation that they didn’t consider the initial flaw seen in the vehicle and reported in hundreds of complaints — stalling — as a safety concern.

The center executive director, Clarence Ditlow, argued that GM knew that stalls had been at the center of at least one previous recall and that the report “avoided and missed crucial facts and issues in constructing what amounts to a corporate defense against criminal charges.”

Questions will also likely focus on what GM plans to do for people injured in the 54 crashes now linked to the defect and families of the 13 people who died in the recalled vehicles. Compensation expert Ken Feinberg, whom GM hired, is developing a plan, details of which are expected to be disclosed by month’s end.

Some of the families of those who lost loved ones will hold a news conference before today’s 10 a.m. hearing. Laura Gipe Christian, whose biological daughter Amber Rose died in a crash in 2005, said Tuesday the families want Barra and Valukas to “come clean about what may be missing out of their report.”

“It’s hard for me to imagine that upper, upper-level executives did not know” about the defect, she said, although that is what Valukas found. “Obviously some people were making a connection between the ignition switch and air bag non-deployment.”

She and others are pushing for legislation requiring federal regulators to assemble a more robust database of safety information and make it more widely available to the public. Automakers would be required to report more potential safety concerns as well.

In his remarks, Valukas — who the Justice Department in 2009 brought in to look into the fall of Lehman Brothers — noted that while GM engineers knew of a problem with ignition switches in the Ion and Cobalt from accident reports, they did not consider it a safety issue, even though they knew it could disable the power steering and power brakes.

“GM personnel approved the use of an ignition switch in the Cobalt and other cars that was far below GM’s own specification. This was done by a single engineer and was not known by those who were investigating the Cobalt from the time of the approval until 2013,” Valukas’ prepared remarks read.

It was not until years later that investigators would link the failing ignition switches with air bag non-deployment — even though a Wisconsin state trooper, a crash investigation group for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and GM’s own air bag sensor supplier all raised the issue in 2007 and 2009.

Valukas also found that GM’s culture kept problems from top leadership. Barra, for instance, has been a top executive at the company for years, but did not learn of the issue until early this year.

Subcommittee Chairman Tim Murphy, R-Pa., said, “Mr. Valukas’ exhaustive report revealed disturbing truths about GM’s systemic and cultural failures that allowed this problem to go undiagnosed for over a decade, but many questions remain unanswered about the recalls and resulting changes within the company.”

Valukas will also acknowledge that while the report answers many questions, it leaves open others and notes: “(G)overnment officials (and perhaps judges and juries) will assess the credibility of witnesses and whether there was civil or criminal culpability.”

The committee has received more than 1 million pages of documents from GM and another 15,000 from NHTSA.